


The Other Her

by gnimaerd



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 13:53:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6118435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimaerd/pseuds/gnimaerd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post 2x15 tag; late one night, Iris asks Barry about her E2 doppelganger, and Barry tries to process his guilt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Her

 

 

“So,” Iris nudges him, “go on.”

“What?” Barry blinks at her over the last of the pizza.

“Go on,” Iris pokes him with her foot again, sprawled at the opposite end of the couch, “tell me about her.”

“Who?”

Iris narrows her eyes at him. “Barry.”

Barry sighs, because he is full of three pizzas and two bottles of soda and he’d really just like to give into the steady slide of the carbs coma waiting to engulf him. He’d like to doze off on this sofa in the West house, with the rain pouring outside the TV a low hum in the background, Iris’s knees flung over his thighs and Joe safely in bed upstairs with nothing wrong, nothing at all.

But Iris is poking at him with her toes again and what is he meant to say to her?

“What was she like? The other me?” Iris persists. “Come on, Barry, you can’t expect me not to ask!”

Barry manages a small, weary smile. “She was like you.”

“Weak sauce. Give me something!” Iris has propped herself up on her elbows to harangue him, “please – come on – was she… smarter than me? Did she have blond hair? A stutter? A wooden leg?”

Barry laughs. “No. None of the above.”

“Then what was she like?” Iris demands, pouting at him, just a little, just enough to make Barry feel… something, deep and warm and buried the last few months – since Eddie.

He shrugs, helplessly. “She… she was pretty awesome. Okay? She was like you, but like – if you’d been a police officer since college so – you know – a little tougher, I guess? A little… scary, she was a little scary.”

“Scary?” Iris giggles. “Me? Cool. Yeah. I can be scary.”

“You can be terrifying.” Barry agrees, gamely, and receives another poke in the ribs for his trouble.

“What else? Was she nice?”

“She was –“ Barry has a flash of those strong little hands on the lapels of his jacket, his back hitting the wall, that kiss, warm and rough and passionate like this must be how they did it all the time and – “great, she was great.”

Iris raises an eyebrow at him, like she can see exactly what’s going on in his head, and Barry feels a prickle of heat up the back of his neck. He really wishes there had been more of a physical difference between them, because looking into her eyes over there is exactly like looking into her eyes here but over there it had meant something totally different. “Was I – she – really a good cop?”

Barry nods. “Yeah – yeah. Um – I saw this award she had, at home. ‘Police Officer of the Year’. I think she was pretty awesome at her job.”

Iris taps her chest. “Of the year, huh?”

“Mm-hm. Pretty impressive.”

“Very impressive,” Iris places the hand on her chest and tosses her hair back like she’s posing for a picture and Barry has to laugh – it feels good and familiar and it’s been a while since he’s seen her happy enough to tease him. Iris lets the pose drop, sinking back against the arm of the sofa again to eye him curiously. “So… you were in her home?”

Of course she picked that up. “Their home,” Barry glances down at his hands. “Yeah.”

“Hers and… his. The other you.”

“Yeah.”

Iris’ expression grows more subdued. “Must have been a little weird.”

Barry shrugs. It was like stepping through the looking glass into his own personal id, hastily buried but now miraculously living and breathing all around him. But it also… wasn’t weird. Because it had been his home. It had been Iris’s home. As upside down and skewed around as it all was, it had still been familiar – that front room had smelled like her, for god’s sake.

“Just a little.”

He matches her tight little smile – the strain, the seething history beneath it – all the things they can’t say, not here, not now, behind the quirk of her mouth.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting her to ask next, but it isn’t what comes out of her mouth.

“Were they happy?”

“Before I arrived and got Joseph West killed?”

“Bear….”

Barry sighs, feeling the guilt hit his chest like a familiar friend. “Yeah. Yeah, she seemed happy.”

“But were _they_ happy?” Iris asks, softly, something unreadable in her expression. “Him, and her? Together?”

“Yeah,” Barry exhales on the word. “Yeah, I think they’re happy.”

Iris nods, chewing on her thumbnail – it’s an old habit, dating back to the days when Joe was endlessly trying to get her to take her thumb out of her mouth. Barry wonders if the other Iris has that habit too.

“So she has a good life?”

Barry can’t be certain what’s behind that question but he has a suspicion – it’s in the quiet, pooling sadness that has lingered in Iris since Eddie’s death, since his funeral, since she had to sit with his mother; that sadness that has only doubled up since her own mom… since all of that.

Iris is having the kind of life where she’s gained and lost a fiancé and a mom in less than a year. And Barry doesn’t really know what to say, how to help her, not when he was the source of one of those losses, not when he was the idiot who screwed everything by telling her how he felt, too late, and by thinking he could change his own history and –  


(And now there’s another Iris, with another loss, in another world, because of him.)

“She has a great life,” Barry offers, softly. “The badge, the gun, this cop partner – the way she talked – she – I mean she ran that precinct, Iris. She had that whole place locked down, she had her whole life, just the way she wanted it – her job, her family, her big dumb husband wrapped around her little finger…”

Iris’s expression softens as Barry holds up a demonstrative little finger.

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah.”

Iris stretches, lazily, her top riding up to reveal a slice of her belly which she pats, emphatically, full of pizza. “Is he cute? The other you? I bet he’s better looking.”

“He’s a nerd.”

“Wow, clearly a completely different guy.”

Barry laughs, “hey.”

“Are you not a nerd, all of a sudden? Did you become a jock whilst I wasn’t looking?”

“She liked that he was nerdy, I’ll have you know,” Barry places a mock-offended hand on his chest, “she thought he was cute. I heard her say it.”

“Oh, well, clearly she and I have nothing in common, either.”

And before Barry can work out whether she’s – you know – actually calling him cute, Iris has rolled off the sofa, yawned, stretched, and announced that she’s going to bed.


End file.
